Painting Fakes

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has flooded our consciousness over the past few months.  Snippets of his talks keep popping up on my social media.  His book tour attracted national interest.  People on the right love him, those on the left hate him. None of this is accidental.  He has been carefully curating his public profile for years, posting prolifically on his Youtube channel, speaking publicly and making himself available to media outlets of all kinds.  He has a devoted following and earns a decent income from Patreon via donations from viewers of his long and complex videos.   His reputation is as someone who thinks deeply about the meaning of life and the significance of ancient mythology for the problem of Being.  However, he has been pushed into the mainstream in the guise of a champion of the Right courtesy of his embroiling himself in a rather strange and silly war in his university over the use of pronouns.  In the ...

For a short time, David Warner's Aussie cricketing mates called him 'The Rev', short for Reverend, after he announced his intention to moderate his combative on-field behaviour.  Over the last year that's gone out the window, and now he has been caught cheating  along with some other team-mates and banned for 12 months.  So definitely not 'the Rev' now.  Much less a prophet. Still, I can't help noticing the resemblance with Moses, the Hebrew stolen generation kid who ended up leading his people out of their Egyptian slavery. There's a lot to Moses' story but you could see it as a spiritual journey in four phases.  In the first, he is oblivious to his true identity.  Not that he is necessarily ignorant of his Hebrew heritage, but he has grown up in a high-status Egyptian household and can confidently look forward to a career in the Egyptian hierarchy and a comfortable, successful life.   In the second phase, he is awakened to the...

There is one thing that keeps me awake at night - climate change.  I don't worry about it in the abstract, I worry very concretely that my two little grandsons will inherit a world that is hostile to human habitation. I spend a day with my grandsons every week, and they are cheerful, innocent little people.  They enjoy life in the moment, trusting that the adults in their lives are caring for their needs.  But I think, perhaps we are not.  What if we are taking away the possibility for them to have peaceful, prosperous lives and storing up hardship and danger for them? It keeps me awake at night.  Which is silly.  Not because the anxiety is irrational or unjustified - the science is quite clear, my worries are absolutely within the possible future consequences of our current behaviour.  It is silly because it achieves nothing.  My tossing in my bed does not save a single gram of emitted carbon, does not take a single micro-meter off the projec...